Students are allowed to take between 18 and 22 MCs worth of courses each semester, which usually works out to four modules. Students may apply to overload or underload, leading to five or three modules respectively.

A module usually amounts to 4 hours of actual class time per week. For common curriculum modules, this number involves two 1.5-hour seminars and one 1-hour lecture per week. Other modules may opt for two 2-hour seminars and no lecture time. This adds up to around 16 hours of class time per week. Aside from this, there are typically 8 hours of homework per module per week. That would mean 32 weekly hours of homework. However, workload intensity definitely depends on the module itself: some classes place a lot of emphasis on readings, while others require completing a lot of assignments. Moreover, most people will rarely actually put 8 hours of work into all their subjects; some take less effort than others.

I should add that not all classes follow this rule. For example, this semester, Introduction to Computer Science had 3 hours of class a week. However, it made up for this by having even more hours’ worth of homework and assignments.
For an overload, class time amounts to about 20 hours a week, and 40 hours of homework. Overloading is a lot of work, so the decision to do so needs to be well-informed and requires getting permission from your Vice Rector. If you overload and drop your module midway (which you are allowed to do!) it would make it less likely that you are allowed to overload next semester (although it certainly is not impossible).

On the other hand, an underload timetable adds up to 12 hours of class time a week. If you underload, you need to have overloaded before, or you need to overload in the future, because everyone needs to have completed a minimum amount of MCs by the end of their time at university.

Another way to accumulate credits is to take courses over the summer. There are a lot of different schools that you can apply to (including the main Yale and NUS campuses) and in general these courses will give you more credits per week than a regular module at school. However, make sure that your course and institution of choice have already been approved by Yale-NUS. If they haven’t, you’ll need to petition the school for a credit transfer.

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